Ryanware

1.5 years ago I came across an article in the Washington Post describing, in great detail, a musical experiment. The article is called Pearls Before Breakfast, the experiment was to see if one of the greatest musician’s could distract people from their rush to work in a D.C. Metro station.

The musician behind the experiment was Joshua Bell, an utterly amazing violinist. I read the article (it’s long) in amazement. I wondered what I would have done in the same situation: you’re in a hurry to get to work and hear some amazing music. Do you stop and listen or plow on?

I’ve often wondered “what would I do?” or “what would I have done?”, not only with simple things like this, but with bigger things. What would I have done during the American Revolution? What would I have done if I’d lived in Jerusalem 2000 years ago? What would I have done if I had been the one to discover how to make donuts?

I took this photo on Nov. 1st, underground in the New York City subway. It was late Saturday night, I wasn’t in a hurry, and it wasn’t very crowded. Still, I almost walked right on past. I caught myself and thought about the Washington Post experiment. I stopped and listened for a few minutes. She was good—not as good as Joshua Bell, but good. I’m glad I stopped to listen.

I had a lot of opportunities to stop and listen in New York. Sometimes I stopped, sometimes not. When I didn’t I was either in a hurry or the musician wasn’t that great. I wanted to stop whenever the musician was good, and tried to listen as long as possible even if I didn’t feel like I could stop.

While questions like “what would I have done?” are important, they’re much less important than the here and now. I believe that one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves is “what will I do?” I’ll never know how I would have acted had I been in that D.C. Metro station that day, but I can decide what to do in similar situations. The key is remembering what we’ve decided when the moment arrives.

Challenges people may face when they consider making choices that matter (which I wrote about yesterday):

• It’s not practical.
• It won’t work.
• It sounds hard.

Today I’m simply posting a rebuttal to those and similar complaints.

What we see, over and over, is that the brave but cheap leadership that leads to passionate movements always (always!) defeats the top-down, mediocre, slow-moving and very expensive techniques we all grew up with.
- Seth Godin, How to Sell a Book (or Any New Idea), free summary PDF

In other words, we don’t have to choose A or B on the basis that choosing anything else won’t make a difference.

It does matter, it does make a difference, and you can do something about it.

In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from.
- Peter Ustinov - English actor & author (1921 - 2004)

With the upcoming election I am pretty sure I am not the only American with feelings similar to those described by Peter Ustinov.

The challenge when faced with an apparent nothing-to-choose-from situation, is to make a choice that matters. How do you make a choice that matters when your choice is “none of the above”? Choosing none of the above feels so hopeless, pathetic, futile. Choosing option A or B, on the other hand, doesn’t make you feel any better.

The answer lies in being true to yourself. Though being overly trite an answer, I actually believe what I just said. If you believe all your options are bad choices, don’t choose A because A is less bad than B, or vice versa. Choosing the least bad option in order to keep the more bad (don’t you love that? more bad? ha!) option from happening is conforming to the conformity that brought about this choice in the first place.

Also, what happened to personal accountability? If you choose a bad option because it’s not as bad as the other option, you’re still choosing badness. I’m going out on a limb here, but I think most people would agree that choosing badness is bad.

So since when is choosing bad a good thing just because the worse bad (I’m pulling out all the stops on good grammar here) didn’t get chosen? Bad is bad. If I choose bad over worse bad and bad is the result, who is responsible? If we’re talking U.S. politics here, then I am responsible because I am a voter. That’s how a democratic republic works. In a monarchy, the monarch is basically responsible for what happens in government. In a democratic republic, the leaders of the nation obviously have a lot of responsibility, but they are only there because we the voters put them there.

Ultimately, we are responsible for everything that happens in our nation.

But what if worse bad is chosen because I didn’t vote for bad? Then you’re not responsible for the worse bad. That’s good. Yay for being responsible.

I do not and cannot feel comfortable supporting “bad” in any form. Where do you stand? It’s your choice and your responsibility. We all have to answer for our responsibilities. Somehow, I don’t think explaining that you supported bad because bad was better than worse bad will go over too well.

P.S. Feel free to write my name in for president when you vote in November. I promise to use good grammar in any speeches I give. Well, maybe.

P.P.S. A choice has to be made, a vote cast. Making no choice at all isn’t any better than choosing a bad option. By not voting at all you’re not opposing badness, which is still bad. To shun badness you have to oppose it.